Welcome back. In this video, we will take a look in our rear-view mirror before we set our sights firmly on the horizon line. We will discuss the recent circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 crisis, and explain how they have surfaced the need for what we are calling resilient approaches to designing for learning. We will also take a moment to reflect on our recent shift to emergency remote teaching, before we consider how we might move towards designs for learning that anticipate and respond to disruption and change, whether we are teaching in times of crisis, or again, in more usual circumstances. As we all recall, vast numbers of higher education instructors at all levels witnessed a radical change in their teaching environments with most colleges and universities closing their doors to face-to-face instruction. This dramatic event was precipitated by the COVID-19 crisis of Winter 2020. As a result, many of us were faced with a sudden and abrupt transition to remote teaching and learning. Instructors of large, undergraduate, foundational courses and small graduate seminars alike, moved rapidly to mount versions of their courses that would function in a virtual environment. Their goal was to create a supportive learning environment for students and to bring the semester to a successful conclusion, even if that meant adjusting expectations for course completion. In addition to curricular concerns, instructors focused on the mental and physical well-being of their students, and students needed their support more than ever before. The circumstances surrounding this move to remote instruction were not optimal, nor were the implementation settings. Design decisions were made with limited time and resources, classes were held in people's kitchens and living rooms, laptops froze, microphones broke, and technology applications failed us. We have come to call this phase emergency remote teaching, and we differentiate it from online learning. At the University of Michigan, classes were canceled for two days to allow instructors to take necessary steps to transfer their instructional materials, activities, and assessments to an online format. At Michigan, The Center for Academic Innovation launched a Keep Teaching website, like many of our peer institutions, to help faculty get their courses up and running online quickly. Your experience may be similar, or it may look quite different. You may have had more lead time or less lead time. In fact, your school or college may have canceled classes outright with the intent of resuming in later months. Some of us have used the metaphor of a lifeboat to describe emergency remote teaching. In other words, it was a means of getting everyone safely to the end of the semester. There may be other metaphors that you have heard or used to describe emergency remote teaching and these might be helpful to share, we will give you the opportunity to do that later on in the course. The goal of emergency remote teaching was to maintain continuity of instruction and to allow students to complete the semester, even if the final version of our courses were not what we had originally intended or planned. Like many of you, I was called into action in March of 2020, and worked quickly to reconfigure my courses, so that they would work as well as possible in a completely virtual setting. Like you, I made the best of the situation. There were great challenges, certainly, but there were also many wonderful and unexpected opportunities that emerged. For instance in my project-based graduate seminar, students invited industry and academic experts to join their final presentations. Guests were able to drop in, listen to students present their technology designs for learning, and provide feedback in the discussion that followed. I believe that students felt empowered to invite guests that they admired, since their request was for only 30 minutes of time through a virtual connection. No one declined our invitations. The result was a rich final session with students receiving affirmation and constructive feedback on their semester-long projects from a supportive panel of guests. I am sure that you can identify unanticipated benefits and bright spots that emerged in your courses, too. As many of us have just wrapped up a semester that included the move to emergency remote teaching, we can reflect on the highs and lows of our experiences. We can also use this time to prepare for what is to come. Although we cannot predict exactly what our future teaching environments will look like, we know that our learning environments will be fundamentally changed, at least for the foreseeable future. We know they will be more uncertain and more dynamic. This new reality calls us to imagine and articulate an approach to learning design and teaching that is resilient to disruption and change. Through this course, we will work together to build a solid foundation for designing courses that are able to withstand changes to the contexts in which our students learn. Let's get started.
